Popular Inquiry – „Popular Culture and Feminism”

We kindly invite Authors to submit proposals to special issue of Popular Inquiry 2/2022 – „Popular Culture and Feminism” edited by Dominika Czakon (Jagiellonian University in Krakow), Stefano Marino (University of Bologna) & Natalia Anna Michna (Jagiellonian University in Krakow).

Deadline for submitting proposals: March 31, 2022.
Publication expected in December 2022.

During the 20th century and especially in the last decades crafting a theory to fit the different forms of popular culture has probably become one of the major preoccupations for contemporary intellectuals, including philosophers, art theorists, sociologists, cultural anthropologists, fashion theorists, scholars of cultural studies, etc. Popular culture must be understood indeed as a central phenomenon for contemporary intellectuals to address, due to its role in compelling us to broaden and rethink a part of the vocabulary and conceptuality of certain academic disciplines, due to its leading role in shaping our taste preferences and aesthetic criteria, and more in general due to its undeniable impact and influence on people’s ideas, opinions, choices as consumers of commodities of all kinds, including ethical and socio-political views at a global level. For these and still other reasons, popular culture definitely deserves serious attention at various levels, including a philosophical level, inasmuch as philosophy (also profitably intersected with different research approaches, such as sociology, psychology, literary criticism, art history and theory, mass media studies, and cultural studies) may prove to be able to offer significant and fruitful conceptual tools to decipher in original ways such defining phenomena of our time.

Of course, the implications and consequences of all this are manifold, ramified and diversified, and they also include, for example, the relation between contemporary popular culture and feminism. As noted by Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser in their outstanding “manifesto” from 2019 Feminism for the 99%, feminism today “risks becoming a trending hashtag and vehicle of self-promotion, deployed less to liberate the many than to elevate the few”, and precisely popular culture can sometimes play a role in this process: for Arruzza, Bhattacharya and Fraser, for example, in the modern age “norms of gender and sexuality [have been] broadly diffused, including via colonialism and mass culture, and they [have been] widely enforced by repressive and administrative state power. […] The mainstream media continues to equate feminism, as such, with liberal feminism [that], far from providing the solution”, for them “is part of the problem”. At the same time, however, it is clear that a feminism that fundamentally and powerfully aims to reach attention of the many and not only of the few cannot help trying to spread its message through all the available instruments, which may include nowadays – beside academic works, journal articles or other publications – pop music, film, TV series, comics, fashion etc., and also the extraordinary impact of social networks and media like Facebook and Instagram on our everyday life.

This evidently creates a problematic but at the same time stimulating dialectics, as it were, between the power and potentialities of popular culture today and the aims of contemporary feminism, including its most radical versions as in the case of Arruzza’s, Bhattacharya’s and Fraser’s explicitly anti-capitalist feminism. This kind of dialectics, so to speak, becomes even more intriguing if we consider how certain leading figures of contemporary feminism, such as Angela Davis or Judith Butler, have somehow become in the last decades veritable icons or “stars” of our time, with a decisive role in the process of their “popularization” that has been played by various forms of popular culture (as in the famous examples of the songs dedicated to Angela Davis by rock stars such as John Lennon or The Rolling Stones) and, again, by the widespread diffusion and impact of social networks and media in the last years.

In the present issue on the topic “Popular Culture and Feminism” we aim to offer to readers of Popular Inquiry a collection of original articles dealing with a wide range of experiences and practices characterizing the universe of popular culture today, with a specific focus on the question concerning the relation between popular culture and feminist issues, and especially the question as to whether popular culture can contribute to a critique of certain prejudices, stereotypes and negative situations that are still present in our time and can thus contribute to promote a significant improvement of the women’s conditions at various levels. On this basis, we encourage authors to seek original perspectives on the broad topic of popular culture and feminism. We are interested in articles that address this topic in innovative ways, including both historical and theoretical approaches.

We invite Authors from various research fields to submit articles related, but not limited, to the following questions and issues:

*   the role that popular culture played in disseminating feminist ideas also beyond feminist organizations and activism;
*   the place of feminist theories within contemporary popular culture;
*   what can feminist theory learn from popular culture and vice-versa;
*   how feminism transformed popular culture form 1960s until today and vice-versa;
*   the different ways in which feminist theories have engaged with popular culture;
*   the concept of popular feminism as an expression of the wider circulation of feminist ideas across the popular culture;
*   the question of domestic femininities in contemporary popular culture;
*   the modern portrayals of gender in popular culture;
*   the figures of girl, female teenager, young woman and old woman in popular culture;
*   the image of feminist activists in popular culture.

Proposals must be sent to:
dominika.czakon@gmail.com; stefano.marino4@unibo.it; natalii26@gmail.com

Proposals must include:
– title and abstract (max 500 words);
-full paper (preferably no more than 8000 words);
– 5 keywords;
– short Bio of the author;
– e-mail address.

We only accept submissions written in English.

Submission guidelines: https://www.popularinquiry.com/submissions